"Three's a Charm"
Copyright 2012 Sydney Michkal
Cover art by Michaela at Sexybookcovers.com
Katie went to Los Angeles for three years, where she lost twenty pounds and most of her self-esteem. She also had two close calls with record deals and more first dates than she cared to remember, and at the end she slunk back to Georgia with her tail between her legs and a tattoo that she had to get removed. It took a long time, but eventually she could go through an entire day without thinking about notes or chords. Now, she thinks about the latest in her run of asshole boyfriends. Katie thinks about opening up a tattoo parlor where people could get better ink than the train wrecks that marked her ass and thigh for two years. She thinks about work and bills and her stupid car that's been clattering around on the same bum alternator for months. Katie doesn’t think about promises made when she was too young to know that Hollywood lied. Katie doesn’t think that she ought to be a superstar by now. She has a whole list of things that she's very good at not thinking about. Once, she got drunk and color-coded it.
Katie doesn’t think about the tall and devastatingly hot wannabe rock star on the stage right now, for instance, or the way that he keeps looking her way and winking like that’s supposed to mean something. (It's not his first time playing the stage. He might be filed under "indigo" on the list. Katie used to hate Open Mic nights for an entirely different reason.) Billy McGee's isn't a big or prestigious bar, and pretty female bartenders are rare enough that she's used to performers and patrons alike staring at her. Besides, Billy's always nearby if she needs him. She hasn't needed his help in the whole eight months she's been bartending here, but it doesn't hurt to be careful. And anyway, the fact that Ryan--she thinks his name is Ryan--is really goddamned hot doesn't make it a good idea to encourage him. She still has a sort-of boyfriend (she honestly hopes that she doesn't, though), and Ryan could be a complete freak. You never knew with musicians
Katie is definitely not thinking about taking him on the offer if he ever makes it with more than his eyes. Damn, she hopes she and Paul are over. He hasn't been to the house in a week, that means something, right? She's so pathetic that she can't even break up with a guy, or tell when he's broken up with her.
Katie focuses so hard on not thinking that she screws up three drinks in a row and gets a set of raised eyebrows from Billy. Flushing, she grabs another set of glasses, tries again, and manages a margarita that probably won't peel her customer's gums off. The next order is a draft beer. Katie concentrates on getting the foam just right rather than the sexy, bluesy rumble coming from the stage, with little success. Ryan has a voice that curls against the back of her neck and down into her belly, lower; Katie shivers and licks a stray trace of beer from the back of her hand. She hardly even notices when a whole group of guys who are maybe, maybe eighteen come stumbling through the door. She does look up, finally, when one of them collides with first a chair, then a table when he tries to right himself from that mistake, and goes all the way down to the floor by way of one of the waitresses. She squawks and catches herself just in time. Drinks go everywhere.
Katie sighs and makes eyes with Billy over the mess. She feels her eyebrows going up: you actually let them in? He shrugs back at her. So either all of those guys just look so painfully young that they’re going to be carded at thirty-five, or their fake IDs are damned good and Billy decided to just roll with it and see what happens next. Katie herself is barely old enough to be working in here. That doesn't leave her much room to talk, even though most days she feels older.
One of the guys, not the one who just ruined his waitress's night, laughs as he grabs his buddy's arm and bodily drags him towards the nearest empty table. Katie takes a closer look at the laughing one under the better light and decides that, okay, fine, maybe one of them is old enough to actually be in here. That doesn’t say anything about the rest of them, but he can stay off of her shit list for the time being. He has dark hair and surprisingly fair, almost pearlescent skin, with blue eyes that stand out even from this distance. Katie watches as he sets an overturned chair upright again and puts his buddy into before whispering against his ear. She can't be sure, but it looks like a plea not to cause any more chaos. Then the laughing one heads over to her. Katie does the bartender smile automatically, because it’s not crowded tonight, Ryan on the stage or not, and she has no excuse not to. Being in a bad mood doesn't count as an excuse.
“Um, sorry,” the guy says as he leans his elbows up on the bar. He’s only slightly less drunk than the rest of his friends, Katie can tell at a glance, but he seems aware of that fact and is choosing every one of his gestures with the exaggerated care of the deeply intoxicated. “He doesn’t make a habit of knocking girls over.”
“Floor’s seen worse,” Katie answers with a shrug. Those eyes. So very blue. She feels color rising in her cheeks in spite of herself, and focuses on drawing beer. “What can I get you?” Ryan on the stage stutters on one of the only bad notes that she’s ever heard him produce; Katie looks up and her customer turns to see as one movement. Ryan’s shoulders are shaking, though he keeps on singing like nothing had happened at all. Oh, fucking hell, he saw exactly what happened out on the floor, too, and he’s doing his best not to crack up right there on stage over it. The members of his band that Katie kinda-sorta knows have told her that that’s just one of his things, that his humor has one of the most inappropriate senses of timing of anyone that she’ll ever meet.
Her customer looks back at Ryan for just a little bit too long. Katie starts to get a tingling sense about him, until he turns back and flips it all on its head with the way that he looks at her, too. His eyes are dilated, just slightly. It makes them even bluer. Katie shifts her weight from one foot to the other, unsure of what she's seeing.
“Pitcher of beer and four glasses,” the guy says, finally managing to pull his eyes away from Ryan. He flashes her a grin, a little sheepish and very self-aware. Katie decides to give him this: he’s not immediately devastating in the way that Ryan is, but the whole package has something to be said for it. “We’re winding down.”
“That's probably wise,” Katie says solemnly. Her mouth twitches. She turns back to her job before Blue Eyes sees.
*
Here’s the thing: somehow, people think that Katie is pretty. She's not entirely sure how. Her upper arms do this wiggly thing and her hips took about three years to get used to once she hit puberty. But she has long dark hair to the middle of her back and large hazel eyes, and it's a rare night when half-a-dozen customers don’t try to buy her drinks. Katie can’t always find a way to creatively spit them out without losing her tip. Between Ryan and Blue Eyes, it has to be said, she feels off-center all night, eager to steady the ground under her feet again through flirting and smiling. So when the bar finally closes down and she gets her shit together, towards dawn, Katie doesn’t think that it’s a good idea to drive. Or walk, maybe. Those fucking hips she has, she swears that the next person who cheerfully tells her that childbirth will be a breeze will get a bar glass to the face. She closed down her register before she got really messed up, and it's not as though Billy doesn't know enough about the Paul thing, but she can still count on him getting fatherly the next time she shows her face.
Speaking of the Paul thing. Katie toys with calling him and then puts her phone back into her pocket with her dignity more or less intact. Even if he did pick her up, they would only fight all the way to her house and then probably inside, too. Better to sit on the sidewalk until the sun comes up and she can walk a straight line again. Odds are good she wouldn't throw Paul out again after he made it into the house, anyway; she's never been good at staying mad. Her anger always manages to short-circuit back around to worry before she has ti
me to really settle in and seethe.
“Katie?” She jerks, looks up. Ryan stands there with Blue Eyes, his guitar slung over his shoulder. The rest of Ryan’s band is nowhere in sight. Neither are Blue Eye's friends. Blue has his hand resting lightly against Ryan’s guitar, though, in a way that makes Katie think that he would rather be touching something else. She feels like an intruder, a little bit, but hey. This is her piece of sidewalk. She claimed it by successfully sitting down before she could fall.
Drinking always makes Katie randy. Paul used to tease her about it, but Paul is part of the reason that Katie got hammered in the first place. She pushes the thought away.
Leaving the other half of her reason continuing to stand in front of her. “I didn’t think that you knew my name,” Katie says stupidly.
Ryan blinks, maybe a little more slowly than usual. He’s not as steady on his feet as he ought to be, either; his set ended hours before, and he had entertained himself on free drinks until the bar closed down. Free drinks, and Blue Eyes. Katie had been kept busy all night, but she’s not blind, either, so.
“I’ve been playing here for nine months,” Ryan says. His tongue sounds thick. “How could I not know your name?”
That’s...really good logic, actually. Katie thinks that she might have hurt Ryan’s feelings. If she were steadier on her feet, she would give him a hug to apologize.
“Are you sure that you’re all right to be out here?” Blue Eyes asks her. He doesn’t look nearly as drunk as Ryan himself; when Katie casts her mind back, she doesn’t remember him having more than a beer or two the entire time that he was in the bar. An easy fact to overlook, given how hard his friends had been hitting their pitchers.
Katie starts to tell him that she’s fine, until she stops and realizes that she’s a woman sitting by herself on a curb in the most dangerous hours before dawn, and that even Billy has gone home. She’s drunk, but she’s not stupid. “Not even a little bit,” she says.
Blue Eyes looks at Ryan, even though Katie can tell from where she’s sitting that Ryan’s ability to make any decision more complicated than untying his shoes is at least six hours away from returning. Ryan looks back. This is how Katie winds up in the backseat of a car that Mystery Guy is just barely sober enough to drive. She watches the sun come up through the back window, catches Blue Eyes watching her through the rearview.
“My name is Adrian,” he tells her. His eyes might be a different color than Ryan's, but Katie still finds herself shivering all the same.
*
Adrian is staying in the kind of rundown motel that you only tolerate if you’re broke, and even then only by telling yourself that you’ll have a hell of a story from it later. He glances over his shoulder at them apologetically as he pulls into the lot and cuts the engine. “Road trip,” he says in a tone that sounds like apology. “The less money spent on where we sleep, the more there is for beer and gas.”
When he says it like that, Katie kind of expects to see his three buddies already piled onto a single bed when they enter the room, but all that greets her is an empty room and a lot of tension. A bed, an end table, a low and ratty couch that might have seen Eisenhower. For a few seconds, Katie, Adrian, and Ryan look everywhere but at each other. It's like being fifteen again.
If being fifteen had included unspoken and very possibly imaginary invitations into threesomes, anyway. Katie considers for a moment and then raises onto the balls of her feet in order to kiss Ryan on the mouth. It starts soft for approximately as long as it takes Katie to draw a breath, and then he grabs her ass in both hands and yanks her up hard against him as the kiss turns into something someone should probably be filming. So says the low and hungry sound Adrian makes from the back of his throat, anyway.
Damn, Katie hopes that situations like this aren't a normal part of being fifteen. She so missed out if that's the case.
"That's my apology, for thinking you didn't know my name," Katie tells Ryan. One corner of his mouth crooks up. It falls again as Katie goes on, "But I am way too drunk for this, sorry, bye." She tumbles onto the couch and closed her eyes, thinks she hears Adrian laughing behind her as she drifts off.
*
Katie doesn’t know how many hours have passed by the time that she wakes. Enough that she has to pee, anyway. She scrambles up from the couch and dashes for the bathroom. As soon as her bladder is satisfied, Katie washes her hands and then ducks her head and drinks what feels like at least half a gallon of water straight from the tap before she raises her head to look into the mirror. Her face is pale and her makeup is smudged about her eyes, making her look ethereal and almost fragile. Katie frowns at her reflection, sure she's forgetting something. She really hopes she didn't drunk-dial anyone.
Well. She did go to a strange motel with the singer that she had spoken less than a dozen words to before tonight and a tourist who didn’t even bother to tell her his name until they were in the parking lot. In terms of incredibly stupid things worthy of the next edition of The Gift of Fear, that probably makes the Top Ten, but she's alive and unharmed, so it's not that.
Katie purses her lips at herself and orders her brain to think. An unmistakable sound comes from back in the room. Katie widens her eyes and watches a blush crawl from her neck up to her hairline. Oh, now Katie remembers. She was thoroughly eye-fucked by two guys, made out with one of them, and then passed out on the couch upon realizing that she needed to sober up a little more before committing to more than that. They, uh, must have found a way to pass the time in the intervening hours. Katie hangs her head down between her shoulder blades and bites her lip hard to avoid giving in to a peal of laughter. Not the most ridiculous situation she's ever been in, especially not if she takes the Los Angeles years into consideration, but close.
Katie keeps her eyes averted as she creeps back into the main room and starts trying to locate her things by touch around the couch, pretty sure that the moment of invitation has passed. She’s a big girl who works in bars for a living, it’s not like sex shocks her, and she’s sober now. Perfectly capable of finding her way home. She didn't call Paul. The night's still a victory.
But Katie’s gaze strays on her, and she catches a glimpse of someone’s smooth, flexing back when she glances up without meaning to. Katie’s breath freezes in her throat. She thinks it’s Adrian; he’s shorter than Ryan but broader. He has a line of moles clustered low on his spine, and he’s so pale that he glows in the room’s scant light. Katie makes note of all of these things in order to distract herself from the fact that it’s pretty obvious that he’s fucking Ryan, and that it’s making her wet between her thighs. She’s a horny drunk. It’s her life's curse.
Could have been you, sweetie. Maybe if the world hadn't been spinning.
Katie turns away, cursing under her breath. Lust makes her fingers clumsy and numb; she drops her bag with a heavy thump that sends her cell phone and cosmetics rolling everywhere. Katie curses again as the activities from the bed come to a sudden halt.
“Sorry,” she calls over her shoulder, determinedly not looking again. “Sorry, sorry. I’m going to get out of here, since I’m not in danger of being gang-raped on the sidewalk any longer. Uh, carry on.” Of course her favorite lipstick would have rolled right under the couch, and far enough back so that the only way that Katie can reach it is to lie flat on her stomach and stretch. Her cheeks are flaming so hard that she gives serious consideration to just leaving it there and buying another one already, never mind that it was department store and expensive and she’s fairly certain the color has been discontinued. Lipstick-procuring strategies are much, much safer than any other direction for her mind's eye.
“Kat,” Ryan calls to her. His voice sounds ragged. Katie wonders what else she managed to sleep through. She also wonders what makes him get off (stop that), thinking that he can call her by a nickname when they’ve managed to exchange maybe two dozen words in the entire time that he’s been playing at Billy's. She also wonders if she’s going to make it home,
because his voice is doing things to her that...his voice is doing things to her. Katie sinks her teeth into her lower lip hard and rises to her feet.
“Don’t worry about it,” she says over her shoulder. “I didn’t see anything.” A patent lie, but Katie has a vibrator and a reasonable amount of pornography at home. She’ll deal with it.
“You’re blushing.” Ryan sounds amused. Katie thinks, and not for the first time, that maybe he’s a bit of a shit.
She turns around, finally, and gives them both a long look. They’ve...um, they’ve disentangled from one another and are now both beneath the covers of the bed, watching her. Ryan looks amused. Adrian watches like he’s not entirely sure what Ryan is going to do next, though his gaze skitters sideways and lingers on Katie for more than a moment. The blankets cover Adrian's lap. Unable to stop herself, Katie wonders if he's still hard.
She’s a bad person. A bad, bad person.
“Because you were fucking,” Katie answers Ryan crisply. His response is a slow grin. Oh, she’s a very bad person. A challenge lies gleaming in that smile, and what the hell. Katie’s never had all that much of a competitive spirit; she just wanted to sing, and maybe that lack of bite was part of...everything, but now he's gone and made her mad. So she walks over to the bed and stares down at them both, but Ryan especially, one of her eyebrows slightly raised.
“Ryan--” Adrian starts, laughing a little. He sounds a touch nervous. Katie is just a little nervous, too, not quite sure of where she sees this ending, equally sure she doesn't want it to end. She feels closer to Adrian already.
Katie kisses Ryan hard, just to shock that look off of his face. He makes a sound against her mouth saying that maybe she succeeds. Katie didn’t really put a whole lot of strategy into her action beyond that, so she doesn’t really know what to do with herself as she deepens the kiss rather than pulling away and strutting out with her point made, as she puts her hands against Ryan’s shoulders to keep herself steady. Their joined lips turn into a boudoir kiss, a horizontal kiss, and accordingly Katie finds it difficult to keep herself upright. Ryan obliges her just fine, taking her about the waist (big hands, oh, no one ever told me the sin wagon rode so smooth) and lowering her down to the bed and across both his and Adrian's laps. Something pokes her in the shoulder. Katie’s a big girl. She knows exactly what that is.
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